Reviews

Wet From Birth

he Faint toyed with life and death for their lyrical peepshow on Tuesday, May 22, 2007 in Chicago's Metro. The Omaha neo-wavers gave a taut performance that indulged appetites for danger, destruction, and dancing.

Two background screens pulsed with provocative video clips throughout the 13-song set. "Birth" was the crawling, focused warm-up which segued into the first of four new songs that evening, which included "Forever Growing Centipedes" and "Fish in a Womb." The boys mostly played from 2004 album Wet From Birth, including strings-infused "Desperate Guys," scathing cool kid burn "How Could I Forget," and bass driven "Drop Kick the Punks." During "I Disappear," the floppy-hatted shadow of vocalist Todd Fink looked like a hammer, driving the refrain "I disappear" into an audience open to the singer's stealthy stage movements and didactically seductive vocals. "Paranoiattack," timely during the 2004 presidential campaign, proved timeless as images from today's news, nearly three years later, demonstrated the increased paralysis of fear in the nation.

The real Doomsday dance hit, however, was Blank Wave Arcade's "Worked Up So Sexual." The urgency and despair of 1.000+ voices dangling from the verse's precipice, washed over by the careening, off-kilter keyboard work felt masochistic and even a bit maniacal. The night may have marked the birthday of guitarist Dapose (Michael Dappen), but it was also the birth of a new day, in a world temporarily less mundane. As suggested in their song "Agenda Suicide," you could follow logic and work for life, but for the crowd at the Metro, for this night at least, there was no denying the brilliance and bruising beauty of The Faint.